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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (39129)	6/5/1999 9:55:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I agree with you that justice or fairness lies at the center of any definition of human perfection. But the suspicion remains that justice a purely human idea. The "Law of Gravity" claims that attraction is proportional to mass. This seems eminently fair -- even just. But the inverse square law seems very unfair. Why should a mass at one parsec have four times as much influence as an equal mass at 2 parsecs? What a suck-up, undemocratic law! And when you look at the consequences! Everything contracting to a point in a big crunch! With a just law of gravity everything would stay approximately where it was (as God intended) even with slight perturbations. What an unjust Universe this is! [please pardon the large number of exclamation points. It was hard not to put it in all caps. These are important issues!] I am particularly pissed about injustice today. I am just recovering from testifying as an expert about how much compensation a deceased motorcycle driver's baby deserves for his father's suicidal incompetence (on Maui -- a near perfect place -- no less). The law sets a standard that means if the State is at fault (or even if it isn't usually) the child gets supported in proportion to his father's expected non-consumed income. The 22 year old decedent was unemployed and untrained, I expected him to earn very little so his child would have been supported at near pauper level had he lived. The child's attorney Jim (who will get 40% of what is awarded to the child and push the kid further into poverty), insulted, abused, and lied about me on the stand, discrediting me as best he could, saying I was biased against the poor. Saying the State regularly used me as their expert because I always came in low. I was not allowed to ask the judge to take judicial notice of the fact that Jim was a piece of shit. The funny thing is that in a very similar case a few months ago in the same court-room -- I testified that in my expert opinion his client deserved one-20th as much as his expert Jack had claimed. He brought this up in this trial to impeach my method. He is free to say anything he wishes and I am not allowed to give a full answer. But I can talk very loud (left over from my Marine sergeant days). So I got into the judge's mind (no jury) the fact that the judge in prior case chose my testimony to believe over that of Jim's expert Jack and wrote in detail that Jack was unbelievable. My comment was excluded (irrelevant) but the judge heard it anyway. Point taken. The great thing is that Jack is Interim Dean of Business (my protem boss) and was testifying against the interest of the State (his major employer -- a conflict of interest in my mind). The Deputy Attorney General defending the state didn't mention that Jack was being paid big money for biting big chunks out of the hand that fed him (on company time.) Successful advocacy in the U.S. requires distortion and untruth. Lying pays off big (Jim has won many multimillion dollar awards). I always feel filthy when I step out a court room even though Jim and I never shake hands. I want a bath very quickly. I never lie. It's all those other fellows, especially Jim. Justice in America is an unattainable dream. We're dealing with people here. Even worse, we're dealing with lawyers. A pox on them (not you of course).

To: The Philosopher who wrote (39129)	6/5/1999 7:19:00 PM
From: one_less	Respond to of 108807

<<I think, though, that you would get almost universal agreement that a world in which people were treated unfairly could not, by human definition, be a perfect world. Our innate sense is that unfairness is imperfect.>> I would like to look at this more closely. Since healthy humans and by societal views "good" human beings generally are those who stand for justice and fight to remove injustice; couldn't we say that in a perfect world we must observe this operationally. If so, I'm not yet willing to dismiss my earlier contention that, it is perfect.